Peter Winick explains how to turn a practice like speaking or consulting into a scalable business. The key: inventory your content from years of work, convert it into different formats, and license it through partners. Assessments, e-learning, and training programs generate revenue without trading time for money.
Peter Winick here, and today I wanted to talk to you about moving your business, taking that transformation from having a practice to a business. So first let me define what a practice is. A practice is when both you and your content need to be in the same room or the same place at the same time for you to be monetizing it. Those are things like speaking, those are things like workshops, those are things like consulting. It's not that they're bad, or it's not that they're good, they just don't scale very well. Lawyers have practices, doctors have practices, consultants have practices. So it's a pretty traditional way of doing business. Having a business is where the assets that you've created over your career, your content, is making money, is being leveraged, is being monetized, and it's not contingent on you being in the same room as your content. So this is things like licensing your content to others to deliver. These are things like e-learning and video platforms. These are things like assessment tools. These are things like training programs that are delivered by other entities or other people where you're not the one. You are the creator of the content, your content's being leveraged and being monetized, and you don't have to be in the same place at the same time with it. So one of the things you need to think about as a thought leader is how do I start the process of transforming from what is typically, in my experience, a practice to a business? Businesses have a much higher value. Businesses can be exited. People don't buy practices, entities buy businesses. So starting that process, there's a few things that you need to do. Number one is you need to take an inventory of what is it that you have. What are the assets that you have that you've created, not just recently, not just the ones that you're thinking about creating in the next 6 months or 12 months, but what have you created over the last 5, 10, 15 years? What format does it live in and what format can it live in? How can you transform that to different mediums and modalities? How can you introduce it to new markets? Globally, domestically, different manager levels inside of an organization. What can you do with that? And then the last piece is really finding those partners that can help you monetize that, that have the right distribution, that have the right technology, that have the right delivery mechanisms in place to help you monetize that. So it doesn't happen overnight. It's not necessarily an easy process, but you can transform your practice to a business. Thanks.
